Base Station Placement Based on Force Fields

Network planning and optimization becomes more and more important in cellular mobile communications due to the growing complexity of the networks. Besides taking new key performance indicators into account such as energy efficiency, the augmented heterogeneity, caused by a variety of radio access technologies (e.g., 3G and beyond as well as WiFi) and network node types (e.g., micro and femto cells), leads to an exploding dimension of the planning process. On the other hand, the degrees of freedom increase as well, giving rise for new optimization techniques. In this paper a novel approach for optimizing cellular deployments is presented.